From the BNL press release, some serious questions about climate sensitivity and aerosols.
Why Hasn’t Earth Warmed as Much as Expected?
New report on climate change explores the reasons
January 19, 2010 UPTON, NY – Planet Earth has warmed much less than expected during the industrial era based on current best estimates of Earth’s “climate sensitivity”—the amount of global temperature increase expected in response to a given rise in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2). In a study to be published in the Journal of Climate, a publication of the American Meteorological Society (the early online release of the paper is available starting 19 January 2010; the link is given below), Stephen Schwartz, of Brookhaven National Laboratory, and colleagues examine the reasons for this discrepancy.
According to current best estimates of climate sensitivity, the amount of CO2 and other heat-trapping gases added to Earth’s atmosphere since humanity began burning fossil fuels on a significant scale during the industrial period would be expected to result in a mean global temperature rise of 3.8°F—well more than the 1.4°F increase that has been observed for this time span. Schwartz’s analysis attributes the reasons for this discrepancy to a possible mix of two major factors: 1) Earth’s climate may be less sensitive to rising greenhouse gases than currently assumed and/or 2) reflection of sunlight by haze particles in the atmosphere may be offsetting some of the expected warming.
“Because of present uncertainties in climate sensitivity and the enhanced reflectivity of haze particles,” said Schwartz, “it is impossible to accurately assign weights to the relative contributions of these two factors. This has major implications for understanding of Earth’s climate and how the world will meet its future energy needs.”
A third possible reason for the lower-than-expected increase of Earth’s temperature over the industrial period is the slow response of temperature to the warming influence of heat-trapping gases. “This is much like the lag time you experience when heating a pot of water on a stove,” said Schwartz. Based on calculations using measurements of the increase in ocean heat content over the past fifty years, however, this present study found the role of so-called thermal lag to be minor.
A key question facing policymakers is how much additional CO2 and other heat-trapping gases can be introduced into the atmosphere, beyond what is already present, without committing the planet to a dangerous level of human interference with the climate system. Many scientists and policymakers consider the threshold for such dangerous interference to be an increase in global temperature of 3.6°F above the preindustrial level, although no single threshold would encompass all effects.
The paper describes three scenarios: If Earth’s climate sensitivity is at the low end of current estimates as given by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, then the total maximum future emissions of heat-trapping gases so as not to exceed the 3.6° threshold would correspond to about 35 years of present annual emissions of CO2 from fossil-fuel combustion. A climate sensitivity at the present best estimate would mean that no more heat-trapping gases can be added to the atmosphere without committing the planet to exceeding the threshold. And if the sensitivity is at the high end of current estimates, present atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping gases are such that the planet is already committed to warming that substantially exceeds the 3.6° threshold.
The authors emphasize the need to quantify the influences of haze particles to narrow the uncertainty in Earth’s climate sensitivity. This is much more difficult than quantifying the influences of the heat-trapping gases. Coauthor Robert Charlson of the University of Washington likens the focus on the heat trapping gases to “looking for the lost key under the lamppost.”
Schwartz observes that formulating energy policy with the present uncertainty in climate sensitivity is like navigating a large ship in perilous waters without charts. “We know we have to change the course of this ship, and we know the direction of the change, but we don’t know how much we need to change the course or how soon we have to do it.”
Schwartz and Charlson coauthored the paper with Ralph Kahn, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland; John Ogren, NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory in Colorado; and Henning Rodhe, Stockholm University.
The early online release of the paper is available at AMS’s journals online site.
Founded in 1919, the AMS has a membership of more than 14,000 professionals, professors, students, and weather enthusiasts. AMS publishes nine atmospheric and related oceanic and hydrologic journals, sponsors multiple conferences annually, and directs numerous education and outreach programs and services. For more information see www.ametsoc.org.
Research at Brookhaven was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.
h/t to WUWT commenter “Don S”
bbc’s richard black puts quotation marks around ‘mistake’, which is done to suggest there may not be a ‘mistake’, then begins with an admission that it is a mistake which has to be corrected. Black still manages to use the date 2035 seven times in the piece. for a brief moment today, bbc world was running a news ticker about this which ended with an unattributed comment that it did not disprove ‘man-made climate change’
BBC: Richard Black: UN climate body admits ‘mistake’ on Himalayan glaciers
The vice-chairman of the UN’s climate science panel has admitted it made a mistake in asserting that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035…
The issue, which BBC News first reported on 05 December, has reverberated around climate websites in recent days.
Some commentators maintain that taken together with the contents of e-mails stolen last year from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, it undermines the credibility of climate science.
Dr van Ypersele said this was not the case.
“I don’t see how one mistake in a 3,000-page report can damage the credibility of the overall report,” he said.
“Some people will attempt to use it to damage the credibility of the IPCC; but if we can uncover it, and explain it and change it, it should strengthen the IPCC’s credibility, showing that we are ready to learn from our mistakes.”..
(final para) But its overall conclusion that global warming is “unequivocal” remains beyond reproach, he (Georg Kaser ) said
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8468358.stm
but the 00’s were the hottest decade on record according to yahoo: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100119/ap_on_sc/us_sci_warm_weather
a second piece on BBC has unattributed ‘authors’ denying the ‘claims’. this is so sloppy bbc:
19 Jan: BBC: India criticises UN warning on Himalayan glacier melt
J Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University, said he believed the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years.
He said they “misread 2350 as 2035”.
The authors denied his claims..
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8467480.stm
uhm… the article describes three scenarios. climate sensitivity at low end of estimates, middle of estimates, and high end of estimates.
OK…. and the possibility that climate sensitivity lies outside the estimated range entirely?
Then he goes on to say it could be due to thermal lag… and then the next sentence is that current studies don’t support that. But they only go back 50 years, so what if the thermal lag is much bigger than that? Which would explain why the study didn’t turn it up, and why climate sensitivity may be outside of the estimated range…
Oops that would also mean any temperature increases we are seeing now were due to energy input changes from before CO2 increases were significant. No reason to consider those possibilities, none at all….
Politically, if I may, AGW has officially been dealt a mortal blow. No small thanks goes to the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts tonight for their vote for a new Senator. This will soon prove to have been the final straw that broke the camel’s back. The weeping and gnashing of teeth that we hear tonight are the “politicians” and “scientists” and “investors” who must now change their stripes and learn how to think for themselves.
can’t resist another:
UK Express: DAVID CAMERON FACES GREEN REBELLION FROM TORY MPS
A poll of the 240 Conservative candidates best placed to win seats at the election found most ranked tackling climate change as their lowest priority…
Tim Montgomerie, of conservativehome, said: “This is a hugely controversial issue for the Conservative Party.”
He said there was little support among the centre-right think tanks that influence Tory policy for action to tackle climate change. He said: “I’m confident the sceptics are going to win. It’s for Cameron to decide how he’s going to get out of this. He’s lost the battle already.”
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/152596/David-Cameron-faces-green-rebellion-from-Tory-MPs
and another:
19 Jan: Collegian: Group calls for Mann’s external investigation
Powers also said Penn State has a good track record for handling these types of inquiries.
“Any notion that we are not prepared to be objective in evaluating our own or are incapable of invoking appropriate sanctions in the event of misconduct is incorrect,” Powers said. “We would not jeopardize the integrity of the entire institution and its researchers for a single individual.”
Mann did not comment on the inquiry, saying that a response would be inappropriate.
http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2010/01/19/group_calls_for_manns_external.aspx
Are there any graphs around from earlier IPCC predictions? Something from the early 90’s, where you can plot the predicted upper and lower ranges of temp increase, and then the actual, measured changes alongside it? Surely such a graph would show that, for 20 years, the temperature changes aren’t within the predictions? I know the IPCC update it all the time, but this would make an interesting series of graphs.
A small point maybe.
If GISSTemp can change the anomaly of one year, 2006, in the US series, by +0.19ºC, and this is, (supposedly), the best temperature series in the World, what is so worrying?
Even if temperature alone were a valid metric!
DaveE
We know we have to change the course of this ship, and we know the direction of the change, but we don’t know how much we need to change the course or how soon we have to do it.”
Nor do we know how to do it. AGW Scientists often ignore the obvious damage that shutting down energy production will do and the fact that there is no viable replacement. It’s like a hobby for some.
“Mann did not comment on the inquiry, saying that a response would be inappropriate.”
Finally he’s telling the truth. I’m puzzled as to why fraud charges haven’t yet been handed down to him.
” less than expected”
“best estimates”
“would be expected to”
“possible mix”
“may be less sensitive”
“may be offsetting”
“present uncertainties”
“impossible to accurately assign weights”
The above is from the first 3 paragraphs only. Mmmmmm where have I seen this sort of thing before??? Ah yes I remember, IPCC reports. Every single page full of maybes mights and possiblies.
One thing we know FOR SURE is that THEY DON’T KNOW
Possibly….”Forgive them lord for they know not what they do”
Probably…”Punish them lord for they know exactly what they do”
Are there any graphs around from earlier IPCC predictions?
Burt Rutan’s presentation from an earlier wuwt blog has a couple of examples. The reports themselves are possibly on line was well, I know AR4 is, but it takes a lot of combing through hundreds of pages to find the specific ones you want. Rutan’s presentation is here
http://rps3.com/Files/AGW/Rutan.AGWdataAnalysis%20v11.pdf
The 90% confidence interval in the heading Figure is just the numerical coherence of the ensemble of model predictions. It’s not a measure of physical reliability. All it says is that if you take a state-of-the-art GCM and run the same simulation, there’s a 90% chance it’ll produce a trend within those lines. That’s it. It says nothing about how confident one may be that Earth climate will actually warm that much.
The whole business of offering physically meaningless numerical confidence limits, instead of true physical uncertainty limits, is that no one has ever propagated the physical errors and uncertainties through a GCM to determine a physically valid confidence interval. These folks literally don’t know what they’re talking about.
Those confidence intervals are a kind of visual evocation of Jerry North’s claim that they, “know all the forcings.” But they don’t know all the forcings, and pretending only works in fairly tales. Their GCMs also suppress the upward cascade of enstrophy (the energy of turbulent atmospheric gyres). Jerry Browning has shown that ignoring this alone produces accumulating errors that quickly make predictions wrong. Neither larger, faster, computers nor decreased meshbox size will solve this problem or improve predictive accuracy.
It’s not just the focus on “heat trapping gases” that’s wrong-headed (not to mention a physically wrong analogy) but the entire confidence in GCMs amounts to “looking for the lost key under the lamppost.”
Easy it is all down to Porkomathics, a revolutionary new way of understanding the behaviour of climate science.
Just as the general relativity theory observed that government funding was not an absolute but depended on the researcher’s ability to exaggerate, and that exaggeration was not an absolute, but depended on the researcher’s government funding, so it is now realized that temperatures are not absolute, but depend on the researcher’s position in government funded institutions, such as the IPCC.
Further explanation of the theory behind Porkomathics:
The first nonabsolute number is the number of disasters that can be attributed to man-made global warming. This will vary during the course of several peer reviewed reports, and then bear no apparent relation to any thing that actually happens, or the number of disasters which are subsequently shown to have not happened, or to the number of new peer reviewed reports that prove that things are even worse than we thought.
The second nonabsolute number is the given time of arrival, which is now known to be one of those most bizarre mathematical concepts, a recipriversexcluson, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival of a man-made climate catastrophe is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the researchers will not have comfortably retired already. Recipriversexclusons now play a vital part in many branches of science, including statistics and accountancy, and also form the basic equations used to gain large amounts of government funds.
The third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of all lies in the relationship between the number of taxpayers footing the bill, the cost of each item, the number of researchers at the trough and what they are each prepared to invent.
Pamela Gray (18:51:17) :
Pamela you may find you are more libertarian than you realize.
REPLY: OK let’s stow the political talk and concentrate on the science here – A
The graph excludes the scenarios anticipated under reduced increases or no increases in emissions. This would seem reasonable since there has been no reduction in the growth of emissions during the time period the observational trends were established.
I know a scientist who works with mathematical models. He says the whole point of models is to test assumptions. You want to find out how complex systems work. So you build a model, using your best assumptions. Then you test it against reality and see how your assumptions stand up. When they don’t, you change them.
These self-styled ‘climate scientists’ don’t look at their assumptions; if reality doesn’t measure up, they just add more assumptions to the model. One is reminded of medieval epicycles.
Could there be something wrong with the assumption about climate sensensitivity to CO2 increase?
/Mr Lynn
Jeff Id (20:00:36) :
More like a Hobby Horse of shoddy construction.
All of IPCC so called science is useless at this point. Soon the EPA will get the memo.
Lisa Murkowski Wants To Block The EPA From Regulating Greenhouse Gases, Has Democratic Co-Sponsor
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/19/lisa-murkowski-wants-to-b_n_428685.html
So that’s how it works, Jeremy (20:52:34)? Great post.
Why Hasn’t Earth Warmed as Much as Expected?
Because it has cooled!!!!!!!
Unless, of course, we’re talking jiggered data, lost data, hide the decline data, Darwinized data, UHI, peer rebuked data, two sets of books data, phony data, a-proxy-ment data, missing data, trashed data, creative data, Yamal larch data, PCA-ed data, etc. …
Why did Chicken Little cross the road? Because the sky was falling on the other side.
“Trust me.” — Al Gore
These poor lads tried 162 years too soon:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/08/15/tech/main4354826.shtml
Canada to Search Arctic For 1840s Wreck
Environment Minister John Baird announced the Parks Canada-led search for British Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin’s ships. The HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were last seen in the late-1840s.
Franklin and 128 hand-picked officers and men vanished mysteriously on an expedition that began in 1845 to find the fabled Northwest Passage. Franklin’s disappearance prompted one of history’s largest rescue searches, from 1848 to 1859, which resulted in the discovery of the passage.
And by 2008, the passage was shut once again.
The analogy with a pot of water on a stove is poor in my opinion. The rate of temperature rise is dampened by the large specific heat of water, and heat trasfer while high is still limited by the thermal conductivity of the pot and boundary layer at the surface between the water and metal.
With radiational heat transfer, photons travel at the speed of light, heat transfer (or lack thereof) should be nearly instantaneous, and the specific and heat capacity of the atmosphere is much lower than the oceans, so either the oceans are a very efficient heat sink, or the atmosphere is just not accumulating that much heat, or both. Takes a lot of heat to raise the temperature of the oceans to even a fraction of what the atmosphere gains.
I think looking at 5-10 years of temperature is so silly really, the variation is smaller than our ability to measure temperature. 130 years, 0.6 deg C, despite a 100 ppm increase in CO2. Nothing to worry about from this perspective really.
And Big Oil says we don’t have much oil left, so doubling CO2 levels, assuming nature leaves mans CO2 behind and discriminates, is about all we can do. Of course, if Thomas Gold is right, then maybe we take a closer look at CO2 and climate in another 50 years. The data is way too sparse now, satellite observations have only about 30 years, we should take the fabians approach and go slow (oh wait, it is the fabians pushing this).
Leif Svalgaard (16:45:55) : | Reply w/ Link
I would have expected the 90% IPCC ‘confidence’ bracket to be symmetric around the ‘Best Estimate’ and thus to include the ‘observation-based estimates’, including zero rise.
Hmm. This would be true in a symmetric system, if the equations behind the confidence level estimate were symmetric to changes of the y axis. Considering that the IPCC method predicts catastrophic warming and trigger points certainly this cannot be the case. I think the asymmetry reflects the expectation of escalating heating. BTW we often get asymmetric errors in particle physics, for various reasons.